Facebook doesn’t live up to its promises

Well here I have attacked or critiqued Facebook many times. Look in the category archives to see what I have written in the past. The key problem I am wishing to address in Facebook today is that it’s becoming abundantly clear that it is nearly impossible for even someone like me who only uses Facebook a little to be able to see all the updates from various pages I follow.

At least twice in the last week I have become aware that I am not seeing page updates from every page that is producing updates, including some of the news sites I follow, and from some of my friends. This is probably more due to technical limitations of Facebook than their much maligned algorithm. However, a key problem is that Facebook simply limits how far down you can scroll down to view recent content on your timeline and therefore makes it difficult to ensure you are fully caught up with all updates, but I also suspect the algorithm may be actively filtering out some content especially from less popular pages.

I think that Facebook wants people to spend more time looking at their site to keep up and I have absolutely no intention of this and have deliberately chosen not to install Facebook on my phones for quite a number of years now. There have been a limited number of occasions when I have posted live on FB from an event and in each instance I installed the Facebook app only for that period then uninstalled it, or used the web browser on the phone to access Facebook over the web.

The problem is that everyone out there is creating Facebook pages because it’s free yet that ties them to Facebook’s platform and its limitations which is that people simply may not be able to see their content. Added to that is the question why I am sure is a hot topic in the US with their free speech beliefs over Facebook content moderation policies. For these and various reasons I recommend everyone have at least their own WordPress blog separate from any social media and feed posts to it. This is primarily why I have been prepared to personally invest into developing the converser.nz site and the blogs on it for the interests I have, rather than relying on Facebook or another platform that I don’t have control over.


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